


He That Died o' Wednesday

by Gileonnen



Category: Henry IV Part 1 - Shakespeare, Richard II - Shakespeare
Genre: Gen, Lords Appellant Snark Club, Meditations on Honor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-27
Updated: 2016-08-27
Packaged: 2018-08-11 10:32:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7887832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/pseuds/Gileonnen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the year before the Appellant Crisis, Jack Falstaff begins asking himself questions about honor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He That Died o' Wednesday

**Author's Note:**

  * For [the_alchemist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_alchemist/gifts).



> In _2 Henry IV,_ Shallow notes that Falstaff was a page to the Duke of Norfolk (also known as Thomas de Mowbray), which was a fascinating connection to _Richard II_ and the history implicit in that opening scene. The rest of the fic grew organically from that point of connection. While I've drawn on history, it's important to note that Shakespeare's Falstaff and his historical counterpart Oldcastle have wildly different life histories. Thus, I have taken the liberty of building Falstaff's history from a few true details (for which I'm indebted to Nigel Saul), a few anecdotes picked up from Shallow, and quite a lot of flagrant lying. I think Falstaff would be proud.

On the outskirts of London, people were tearing their own houses down.

By the time Jack Falstaff happened by, half the row was already lying in ruins. The air rang with the knell of heavy hammers striking stone, louder even than the clamor of anxious voices. Each blow sent sharp chips and mortar dust flying. The nearest house had been stripped to its timbers, and a few burly men were roping the struts to bring them down.

The streets were choked with wagons and carts, all piled high with what treasures the wreckers thought worth salvaging: dust-caked children, unwashed laundry, spinning wheels, anxious chickens crammed in loose-woven baskets. Everyone, it seemed, had news of invasion. The French had been sighted off Oxney, or perhaps it was Sandwich--the French had put up a wooden castle near Yarmouth--the French were even now taking soundings off London. "The French are in London already!" one old man insisted, to a general roar of agreement.

"They've taken the king, God rest his poor soul!" a woman put in, not to be outdone. "There's no hope for us now but to confess our sins and make for Hereford."

 _The king's in Bristol getting buggered._ Jack Falstaff stood well back from the carnage, munching an apple and occasionally brushing a piece of rock from his kirtle. "The French must envy us bitterly," he opined, to no one in particular, "for it seems to me that the worst enemy of the English is the English."

"Hush, you," snapped a woman with a squirming goat in her arms. "This pile of stone will be London's wall, if the French come by land."

" _If_ the French come by land," Jack agreed. "But in any other case, it will only be the ruin of your house, and no shelter to you or to London."

"Rather leave it a ruin than have the French toasting their victory with wine from my cellar," said the old man who'd announced the invasion of London. His own wagon was stacked with barrels and casks.

Jack laughed and took another bite of his apple. "If the French have already won, it boots us little to deny them a barrel of sack. What profit is there in fleeing? Our lives? Our lives are a trifle, when weighed against our honor. Let's toast to the next victory, and may God send it our way instead."

The woman with the goat spat to one side. "What good is honor, to us or to England? You can't eat it, drink it, or wear it. It doesn't warm your feet or feed your children. Honor's a piper that plays fools to their deaths, and no more. No, we're for Herefordshire, fast as we can. Bugger honor, and bugger you, too."

With a tremendous crash and a cloud of dust and splinters, the timbers came down at last. The next house in the row sagged slightly as its neighbor toppled, and the men on the ropes leapt clear.

It was a shame, Jack thought. Judging by the rest of the row, it had been a fine little house.

*

The summer faded, and with it the threat of a French invasion. The coasts were quiet. Richard returned from his sojourn in the west, sans Robert de Vere and quite a lot of cash. His court welcomed him home in the state due to a king, of course, but even the people who'd feared him captured didn't exactly toast to his return. The nights drew down earlier, and men lit candles against the darkness and gathered around their hearths to share complaints.

Around the Duke of Norfolk's hearth, the complaint was almost always, "The king's favorites must be called to account."

Jack was not particularly fond of the young duke, a green-eyed adder of a man with a listening look and a precise grasp of accounts. A younger brother by birth and a duke by tragic happenstance, he had inherited his father's litigious tendencies and his mother's tight fist on the purse strings. He had no friends outside of Parliament, and when he brought them home, they could talk of nothing but precedents and pence.

"And what do you think, page?" the duke would sometimes say, after he had finished a thorough anatomy of the hated de la Pole's transgressions. On this particular September evening, he cradled a fourth goblet of wine in the web of his hand, and his cheeks were hectic with drink. He met Jack's eyes and brought the goblet to his lips again. "Our king surrounds himself with flatterers. This, no man can dispute. Is this merely an indignity that we must suffer, or do their excesses constitute a crime?"

By Jack's reckoning, he ought never to have been privy to these conversations in the first place. He'd been meant to serve as a page to the duke's father (God rest his soul), but what with the Crusade and the ugly business of the inheritance, Jack hadn't actually managed to get himself into the livery before Baron Mowbray's three-year-old son had inherited the title. They'd been knighted together, Jack and John de Mowbray, and afterward they'd gone roaring down to the stews to drink each other under the table.

John de Mowbray the younger had called Jack _page_ as though it was a joke they shared. Thomas de Mowbray only called Jack _page_ when he wanted to dig at him.

If Jack had been less deep in his own cups, perhaps he wouldn't have risen at the dig.

"Well," began Jack, "you can be sure, Your Grace, it is a proverb that a flattering mouth works ruin. A flattering mouth, I say, that is proverbial, and it is a great crime indeed to lead a king to ruination. But a man must consider the great power of the king, as it were the majesty of the king. What is flattery to him? When he could extend one finger--his smallest finger; you see, even my smallest finger is greater than a king's, for girth if not for majesty--and demand your flattering tongue in a golden box? A king knows that he may have as many tongues as he likes. He may dine upon tongue until the stars fall from the heavens, if he likes. It isn't flattery to say so. And so I say, I say it is not flattery that ruins a king. A king is only ruined when he starts to think of himself as a man. A man is a mere sack with legs, and his greatest mystery is the alchemizing of wine into piss."

He paused for effect, then found that he had lost the thread of the argument. The words tumbled together in knotted skeins, all wet with claret wine.

"A king who dined on tongues every night would still have to answer to Parliament for the cost of them," said the Duke of Norfolk. His pale eyes were very bright. "Even for a king, there must be reasonable limits to protect the security of the realm. The untrammeled power of a king is only a story we tell, and perhaps not one we'll tell for much longer."

"It pleases God to place a king at our head, and I will not contest his power," put in young Henry Bolingbroke, whose clothes were lined with fur against the autumn chill. "The king's flatterers blind him to important matters, Sir Falstaff. They distract him with trivial matters and the pageantry of titles and coats of arms, all while his coffers grow empty and our enemies harry our flanks. They overstep the boundaries Parliament has seen fit to place on the king's sovereign power, but they also make him forget why we gave him those strictures in the first place."

Jack privately thought that King Richard knew very well why Parliament had given him strictures, and had chosen to flout them out of sheer mule-headed spite rather than ignorance.

Still meditating on spite, he said, "When the French were at our gates with the king's head on a pike--" and here everyone laughed, the harried and half-relieved laugh of men who had not seen the enemy for long enough to be nervous "--I went to the edge of London to visit my friend Shallow, who was at the time staying at the Inns of Court. What do you think I saw there, my lords? I saw men tearing down their own houses, carrying out their worldly possessions in carts and wagons. One of them had a cart full of wine, which he said he had saved so as to prevent the French from toasting their victory with it. What good would it have done to prick their honor? They would have their wine in spite of the French, and that was honor enough for them."

"Robert de Vere stands to gain great honor in Ireland, if he can manage not to bungle it," the Earl of Arundel replied with a laughing look. He was the oldest of the gathered men, a seasoned warrior, and Jack could not forget that he had an admiral's grasp of strategy. "Many commanders have manured their men's lives to reap that flower they call honor, then found that it blemishes as soon as it is plucked. I say, let him deck himself in honor as the Romans did of old. All his titles and glory make him no less a canker in the state."

"Let's not speak so harshly of honor," Henry Bolingbroke replied. He alone of the duke's guests looked sober.

"Honor is a mere scutcheon," sneered the Duke of Norfolk. "If it falls on the field, any man may wear it. Even my page tries to 'prick the honor' of fishwives and innkeepers, as though it raises him in their eyes to point out how far they've fallen."

Jack clasped his hands over his stomach and did not reply. _Your father was honorable, too, in his way_ Jack thought, while the conversation turned toward the Lord Mayor's latest overreach. _And when a Turk cut him down just shy of Constantinople, I'm sure his honor was a real comfort._

*

When Jack rambled out again to the outskirts of London, he saw that the ruined houses still kept their vigil against the French. Most of the larger stones had been gathered up by thrifty masons. Shattered timbers clawed at the leaden sky.

Perhaps their former tenants had decided that Hereford suited them.


End file.
